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Comment by sologoub | Hacker News Reader

To add to this, the screens are definitely buggy still and ~15 min reboots are not uncommon, but all of these are HARDWIRED. I'm scared of how bad it will be when everyone tries to connect to the wifi to stream the same content.

Managing the local streaming server is not going to be any easier either.

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I've seen it on Air Canada (or Red or Jazz, or whatever it was called that day), and it actually worked quite well. They offered to rent tablets for people who didn't have devices.

I suspect managing the streaming server isn't going to be much more complicated than managing the old wired content sever... On the other hand, not needind kilometers of cables for entertainment, not needing to maintain them, makes a huge difference for the airlines. This is not as simple as pulling a cable in your house, planes have crashed because of fires from bad maintenance/install of cables, including cables for entertainment.

I'd hope they'd have separate cable trays for critical and noncritical wires. And we have flame-retardant plastic that isn't deadly poisonous.

Anecdotal, I know, but I was on a flight a few months ago where the wire for the hand held controller for the entertainment system had gotten so hot it burnt my hand. I'm not sure how far away the autoignition temperature of cotton is from the burn-my-hand-temperature, but I suppose it's possible that if it was cotton on that wire as opposed to my skin it may have caught fire. And while the wire delivering that content was non critical and probably on a seperate power network to the main systems of the plane, a fire on a plane is a fire on a plane regardless of which system caused it.

You can cause a full thickness burn at really low temperatures. Water will cause a 2nd or 3rd degree burn in 2 seconds at 65 C.

http://www.accuratebuilding.com/services/legal/charts/hot_wa...

I think regular cotton burns at something like 200 C. Cotton on a plane is going to have fire retardant properties.

Burns are complicated, but if you'd touched something that hot you'd have had an instant burn, probably with blistering.

Maybe it's a function of how many people are using it so far but the WiFi entertainment option on United works great. With AmazonFire tablets available for $50 it seems pretty silly at this point for airlines to install extremely expensive screens that also take up leg space in many cases.

It may be a pain for the family that travels once a year but, hey, they didn't actually have movie options until recently anyway. I'm sure they can deal with it.

I posted above but my experience with United and those sitting around me on my two international flights was horrible. Nobody could connect, or some could and then would get disconnected 10 minutes into the movie. I'd rather have a crappy screen on the back of the seat that works.

I've used it maybe a dozen times and never had an issue. That said I always travel with pre-loaded TV and movies (and books) in any case so the inflight system is just a bonus.

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